Jonathan Safran Foer

Jonathan Safran Foer (born 1977) is an American writer best known for his 2002 novel Everything Is Illuminated. He lives in Brooklyn, New York City with his wife, novelist Nicole Krauss, and their son Sasha.

Biography

Born in Washington, D.C., Foer attended Georgetown Day School, and Princeton University where he studied philosophy and literature and was awarded the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prizes. In 2000, he was awarded the All-Story Fiction Prize. He is the editor of the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell for which he also wrote the short story "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe."

He was awarded a Bronfman fellowship for study in Israel.

He has been published in the Paris Review, Conjunctions, The New York Times and The New Yorker, and his short stories include "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" and "The Sixth Borough." "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease" is also to be found in the collection of short stories edited by Dave Eggers, "The Burned Children of America" and in "The Unabridged Pocket Book of Lightening," produced as part of the Penguin 70's series, while "The Sixth Borough," in a slightly altered form, is incorporated into Foer's second novel, "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close."

He traveled to Ukraine in 1999 to research his grandfather's life. Though he had not originally planned it, this trip resulted in his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, which was published in 2002 by Houghton Mifflin. The book garnered him a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award.

Everything is Illuminated was adapted to film by the director Liev Schreiber and features Elijah Wood in the lead role and came out on September 16, 2005.

In his second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, published in 2005, Foer uses 9/11 as a backdrop in the story of 9-year-old Oskar Schell. Although this novel was not as well received by critics as the debut, it has sold briskly and been translated into several languages, and the film rights have been bought.

A vegetarian since he was 10 years old, in 2006 Foer recorded the narration for "If this is kosher" ^*, a harsh expose of the kosher certification process that advocates vegetarianism and also includes Rabbi David Wolpe and Rabbi Irving Greenberg.

Foer is also the younger brother of Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic, who recently wrote How Soccer Explains the World. His younger brother Josh is also a journalist, specializing in science writing. He and wife, Nicole Krauss, had their first child, Sasha, in February 2006.

Criticism

Foer is one of the more controversial novelists of the past decade, not for the content of his writing, but rather for the extremely polarized responses he elicits from readers. Upon the initial release of "Illuminated", it received overwhelming acclaim, not only from major publications, but also from many well-known authors, including John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Salman Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, and Dale Peck. Some of the reviews verged on the hyperbolic, particularly in The Times, which proclaimed that the book was "a work of genius," that Foer had "staked his claim for literary greatness," and that "after it, things will never be the same."

Detractors of Foer find his work gimmicky and overly ambitious. Particularly bothersome to some readers is the virtual catalogue of modernist devices he employed in his first novel, including time shifts, dialect writing, fanciful mock-history, dramatic prose, poetic devices, and stream-of-consciousness, all of which strike some as insincere and pretentious. The most notorious of these critics is Harry Siegel of the New York Press, who bluntly subtitled an article on Foer, "Why the author of Everything is Illuminated is a fraud and a hack."

More recent criticism has taken a more evenhanded view, acknowledging the breathless silliness of some of the writer's early acclaim, while appreciating his considerable talent.

Works

Short stories

"If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe"
"A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease"
"The Sixth Borough"
"Cravings"

Novels

Everything is Illuminated (2002)
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)

Other

A Convergence of Birds, an anthology of poetry and fiction which Foer edited
"A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah," a December 22, 2005 editorial in The New York Times

External links

1977 births | American novelists | American short story writers | Jewish American writers | Living people

Jonathan Safran Foer | Jonathan Safran Foer | Jonathan Safran Foer | Jonathan Safran Foer | Jonathan Safran Foer